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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26986843">whoever seeks abroad may find</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly'>Chestnut_filly</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Actual Fic [15]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Bright Star (2009), Literary RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Jewish Character, Childbirth, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Past Character Death, Poetry, Post-Canon, Postpartum Depression</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:40:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,353</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26986843</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer, 1834. Boulogne, France. </p><p>Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?<br/>Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fanny Brawne/Louis Lindo, Past Fanny Brawne/John Keats</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Actual Fic [15]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/935439</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>whoever seeks abroad may find</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Additional content notes: This fic deals with themes of childbirth and attendant fluids, postpartum depression and anxiety, thoughts of self-harm and suicidal ideation, and grief. A child undergoes circumcision in a religious context. Fanny thinks things regarding the brit that might be construed as culturally insensitive. </p><p>Georgian Europe was not all-white, the Brawnes had ties to the colonial West Indies, and Louis Lindo was Jamaican-Sephardi; there is no evidence of religious practice in the Brawne-Lindo(n) home and there is no evidence of its absence. Brawne's maternal family wealth came at least partially from administrating colonies in the Caribbean, while Louis Lindo's grandfather enslaved human beings. This is inextricably part of the backdrop and context of this movie and the lives of the Romantics.</p><p>Title and summary come from Keats' "To Autumn." The poem quoted in the text is <i>Endymion</i>. Play spot-the-reference with a handful of others and the film itself.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fanny did not think at all as she labored. The midwife kept Louis, who might have sung to her, out of the room, and she walked and panted and pained in a speechless groaning murk. </p><p>Once her little boy was in her arms she thought in snatches of exhausted brightness, rather like a poem, she thought, and caught the impression between her eyes to note its resumption. There were ten fingers and ten toes, and there a basin of scarlet rags, and there a purple boy with puffy eyes, wailing like a cat.</p><p>“You’re so ugly,” she laughed, and caught herself laughing, and flashed again to the basin of rags, and kept laughing. “You’re the ugliest thing, what a joy, my god.” </p><p>The door opened at last to admit Louis, who half-ran to the bed and put his curly dark head on her left breast, which hurt like the very devil. The littlest boy, her boy, rooted around her right breast, and Fanny hitched another breath and did that most un-Fanny-like of things and swooned. </p><p>---</p><p>Something that felt like real thought resumed three days after the birth. Sra. Lindo brought out the baby’s fashadura with all Fanny’s treasured French needles and flosses, brimming over with the smiles and kisses Fanny had met with her own just yesterday. Fanny stared at the white fabric that she had cut beside all Louis’ sisters and cousins, laughing and joking about the styles of Jamaica and France and the Levant, and fell into an undertow of musing that seemed to drag her out for weeks.</p><p>Dressing in more than her shift for the first time in days, she thought of John. She thought that had she caught pregnant by John, she should have been more comfortable; the precipitous drop in waists in the last few years had brought back the long busk her mother had worn in her pairs of bodies all her life, even while her daughter dressed after the figures on Greek pottery, or French ideas of them. No matter that the cording made her feel settled and balanced after days of feeling like a badly set blancmange. What wouldn’t she give for her old pink gown with the ruff she had spent a morning in the apple trees gathering? It was long out of fashion.</p><p>She thought poisonously of John when they gave her baby boy his brit eight days after his birth, hating his crying and the appearance of even more bloody towels -- John would not have done this -- and she hated Louis and Sra. Lindo who loved her, and baby Edmund who screamed, and herself.</p><p>Louis tried to sing to her and Edmund to sleep, and she thought of John’s weak tenor, and the coughing near the end when he tried to speak for long or even hum. And then she stayed up the whole night because Edmund kept crying, and she remembered with a shock visiting Tom Keats, and felt that if she was asleep when Edmund awoke howling she would be an utter failure, a shipwreck. Sra. Lindo said, and she knew, that it was only that he was hungry or dirty, but what if it was a nightmare? What if it was worse? And then in the morning she could not bear to be touched but lay on the bed in mockery of how she’d once lain facing John, her still-swollen belly pushing her knees away. </p><p>Mostly she thought that she had not thought she was this person any longer, the half-widow who cried until she couldn’t breathe and mused darkly about knives. In a rare flash of humor she thought of Mr. Brown pontificating on the uninterruptible importance of musings, and then desperately wished for the interruption of oblivion, or John, or the simple joys of flirting and dancing and sewing which she would never, no never feel again.</p><p>--</p><p>The undertow let her go slowly, then all at once. The waning moon peered over her shoulder through the shutters as she tried to determine why she’d woken. Her breasts were full, and ached, but Edmund hadn’t woken her crying. Fanny pushed herself upright and peered down to the cradle, and saw with a burst of panic that Edmund was not there -- but neither was Louis, and a low murmur sounded from Sra. Lindo’s bedroom next door. </p><p>Fanny pulled her banyan on -- there was a tear near one of the belt loops; a visible embroidered patch would look well there -- and walked to the next room. </p><p>Sra. Lindo had a lamp lit and sat darning a stocking, and Louis stood by the window, half golden-warm in the lamplight and half barred in silver from the moon, Edmund in one arm and a thin volume in the other. His plush baritone graveled more than usual, from the lateness of the hour or from trying to be quiet, she did not know. She knew what book that was even as she just made out Louis’ rounding, tapping accent in English-- </p><p>“…Do we merely feel these essences,” he read, “For one short hour; no, even as the trees / That whisper round a temple become soon / Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon--”</p><p>“Where did you find that?” </p><p>Sra. Lindo and Louis looked up, expressions drifting towards the concern that had so chafed these last weeks, and which tonight felt like an invitation to feel well and make them smile with their same wide mouths under their same proud brows, both of which she could tell already belonged to Edmund too. </p><p>“You read it well,” Fanny continued, quiet. If Edmund was asleep, she should not wake him. </p><p>“You keep it in your sewing basket,” Louis said, reaching out to offer her the book, not breaking the little jigging bounces they had learned kept Edmund quiescent. “Other than Mamá’s siddur it’s the only book in the room; it seemed to be a help with Lalo. I’m sorry-”</p><p>“No,” Fanny said. “No. You read it--” She paused in anticipation of the pull in her gut and the constriction of her throat, but they came as echoes, ringing but insubstantial. And there was her dear Louis, looking somehow even younger in the mixed light, dancing in place as he always did, smiling half the smile she thought could be seen from across the Channel in its fullness, which, as it had from the first hour they’d met, drew a smile from her in return. “You read it beautifully. You know I find your voice lovely.” </p><p>Might she be able to walk across the room to Louis again after all? She thought perhaps tomorrow the shades in her throat and chest would be gone farther away. So perhaps tomorrow. She walked to Sra. Lindo on the loveseat instead, and laid her head on her lap as she had done with her own mother when she was a girl. She felt tomorrow she would be grown-up again, perhaps, with the strengths of her griefs and her clever hands and precise eye. But tonight she was in between, a fairy peering from under the hill, looking at the moonlight shining through the shutters like the ghost of a ghost of an old wish.  </p><p>“Would you start from the beginning, Louis?” With less resistance than she thought she might meet, she put on her smile. </p><p>Louis looked back at her, and in one of those minor feats of grace she admired so in him, flipped back to the first page singlehandedly, without jostling Edmund or losing the rhythm of his bouncing. He struck a pose none the less poetical for the baby in the crook of his elbow, and Fanny found another smile, and Sra. Lindo’s hands dropped to her hair. </p><p>Louis’ voice rolled out soft across the room, too strong to be smooth in its quiet registers. Fanny thought of how she might sew a toy butterfly. </p><p> “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never / pass into nothingness; but still will keep / a bower quiet for us, and a sleep--”</p><p>--reached out and she let it come, waiting out the stars.</p>
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